Split decisions
Two years after The Split concluded, the BBC legal drama is returning for a two-part special set in Spain. Star Nicola Walker, creator Abi Morgan and executive producer Jane Featherstone tell DQ why they wanted to reunite for The Split: Barcelona.
While roles in dramas such as Unforgotten, River, Spooks and Last Tango in Halifax have elevated actor Nicola Walker to national treasure status, there’s one character in particular that has prompted members of the public to approach her in the supermarket.
The part is question is that of Hannah Defoe, the lead character in BBC legal drama The Split. For three seasons between 2018 and 2022, viewers watched as the family law expert negotiated divorces for her high-profile clients as her own marriage to barrister Nathan Stern (Stephen Mangan) broke up along the way.
Now The Split: Barcelona is set to catch up with Hannah and her family two years after the series ended as they travel to a magnificent vineyard for a sun-soaked destination wedding in Catalonia’s wine region.
“It’s made my life a lot easier because every time I go to the supermarket, I have someone come up to me and say, ‘Why don’t you and Nathan get back together? Are you doing more?’” Walker tells DQ about the upcoming two-part special. “My standard reply for years has been, ‘Never say never.’ Since this has happened, now I love going to the supermarket again.
“People are a bit cross about Unforgotten, they’re a bit angry [Walker’s character, Cassie, was killed off]. With Spooks fans, someone would sidle up to you and go, ‘The package will be arriving when the condor lands…’ The Split fans are equally fabulous and that will often be men and women shouting at me. I was at Baker Street station a while ago and a woman shouted across to me saying, ‘I wish you’d done my divorce.’ I’d have got her a much better deal.”
Produced once again by Sister (Chernobyl, Eric) and distributed by BBC Studios, The Split: Barcelona will explore themes of love, legacy and modern marriage through familiar characters including Hannah, her sisters Nina (Annabel Scholey) and Rose (Fiona Button), their mother Ruth (Deborah Findlay), Nathan, Ronnie (Ian McElhinney), Glen (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith), Liv (Elizabeth Roberts) and Gael (Alex Guersman).
Joining the cast are Toby Stephens (Black Sails) as eligible family lawyer Archie Moore, as well as Manu Fullola and Romina Cocca as glamorous hosts Alvaro and Valentina.
Series creator and writer Abi Morgan had always conceived The Split over three seasons as it went from a marriage intact to a marriage in divorce. “But honestly, when you get just an amazing alchemy of characters, it’s been such a pleasure working on this show,” she says. “And what’s so wonderful about when you do a returnable show is that you really can build and develop those characters over several episodes.”
The series originally emerged from the fact that Morgan had previously worked with Walker on her supernatural crime drama River, only for the actor to play a ghost. “So I wanted to finally put her in a room where she could really properly interact,” she jokes. Then, when Spooks and River executive producer Jane Featherstone launched Sister, The Split “was the first show we spoke about. I wanted to do a show about sisters. Jane’s been such a key part of my relationship with my work, and we’ve both got sisters. So [The Split: Barcelona] was also a desire to go back to those sisters, like a family. That was really the motivation for me.”
Walker describes The Split as a “perfectly formed” drama, a rare title that had a satisfying ending as Hannah’s divorce from Nathan was finalised and she was finally able to look forward to the future. Now Morgan is inviting viewers to find out what she’s been up to since those closing credits rolled.
“I watch a lot of telly and the end of the story is often very disappointing in drama,” Walker says. “With The Split, I thought it was brilliant. It was perfect. There was a great deal of pain to that because, as the cast, we felt that really will be it. Although there was this great love for all of the characters, we just thought, ‘We’re not going to get a chance to get back together again,’ while secretly hoping Abi and Jane would perhaps get drunk around the kitchen table at some point and decide to revisit them.”
In fact, that’s kind of what happened. “Nothing gave me more pleasure than when we were genuinely having a glass of wine and riffing, and it was all down to whether Abi could see another story to tell – and she did,” Featherstone reveals. “Talk about joyous and brilliant and glorious. Also, I love family dramas, but truly, there aren’t many people [like Morgan] who can elevate them to something that is beyond the traditional and actually makes you laugh and cry. I just love that family dynamic and its mixture of humour, heart and gravitas is just profound. Honestly, it’s genius.”
The idea to send the story to Spain came to Morgan in a “lovely dream moment” where she imagined taking the show’s core characters away for a “magical weekend” that coupled a wedding with the dramatic “intensity” of telling a story over just two episodes.
“It’s the loves and losses and betrayals and new beginnings, and all of the banter of the sisters and the intergenerational love, friendships and tensions that they’re all dealing with absolutely come to the fore,” she says.
Quite whose wedding they are attending is unclear. Morgan wants to save the surprise. But she does reveal new character Archie, an international divorce lawyer, makes quite an impact on Hannah.
“What’s lovely about this show is that yes, that central arc of three seasons had come to its natural conclusion,” Morgan says. “But the chance to go away with the family for a weekend was really irresistible. Toby comes into that as a cat amongst the pigeons, and as you would imagine, everything that should have gone right goes wrong and everything that went wrong hopefully will go right in the end.
“It’s escapism and it’s lots of sangria, Spanish dancing, beautiful vineyards and amazing sunsets. Toby really just falls into step with everyone really beautifully and crosses paths with Nicola’s character, with Hannah, and slightly rocks her world.”
But after ending the show, how did Morgan confront reopening the story to find out what they did next?
“We’ve always tried to bed this family in a kind of truth. Yes, there’s a moment of harmony, a moment of contentment, a moment of awareness. But we also knew that there was always still going to be chaos,” the writer says. “Nina was still looking after her child on her own, and she’s an alcoholic so she’s dealing with that. Rose is colliding with a brand-new blended family and with Hannah at the heart of it, one of the great reasons why I wanted to write this show was I wanted to take out the taboo that I think is still around divorce and the idea of it being a failure.
“It’s about family and it’s about a community of people who live with their dysfunction. Everything isn’t always joyous. Yes, there’s huge amounts of laughter and fun, but people show their raw, ragged edges. For me, that’s been one of the joys of writing it.”
Walker believes the “genius” in Morgan’s writing is that when the series finale faded to black, the characters were so real that it was easy to imagine they got up the next morning and carried on with their lives.
Featherstone adds: “They shut the door, but they carried on for the last two years and we’ve just opened the door again and there they are. We’ve just rejoined two years later.”
Walker also found that Hannah reappeared to her as soon as she picked up the scripts for the special, which will air on BBC One and iPlayer later this year. “It’s the most amazing feeling with a script, with a story, where every page for Hannah, I’m thinking, ‘Oh, I can’t believe she’s doing that now. Oh, she’s not going to do that? Oh, she is,’” the actor says. But while it might have been easy to revisit the characters in London, here they will all be put in an unfamiliar environment.
“That can sometimes be really dangerous for drama where you take a well-loved series and put it somewhere else,” Walker notes. “What’s brilliant is the Defoes are in Barcelona, but they’re still very much the Defoes. It’s not like they suddenly start behaving differently. It’s that thing where no matter where you go, you take yourself with you, and that becomes apparent in this.”
In practice, taking the Defoes to Barcelona was “definitely fun,” admits Featherstone, though the production had to overcome an unexpected amount of rain at the start of filming. An early location visit to a vineyard also didn’t quite conjure the blissful wedding scene they had all envisioned.
“We went to this vineyard in January/February-time and there were just rows of sticks and this beautiful idea they were going to walk through the vineyards just didn’t seem possible,” Morgan remembers. “Then we got there again in April/May and it had become the thing we wanted, which was just this gorgeous, romantic landscape to put this beautiful family drama in.”
After several visits before and during production, Morgan was also able write more of the setting and locations into the scripts. “I always say to young writers when I work with them to really use that title properly. Go on recces, really see landscapes, because you can start to write for that and get to know your actors and get to know your costume design and your production design,” she says.
That viewers could also see themselves in The Split – from Rose embarking on life in a blended family to Hannah newly dating in her 50s – meant the show had a universal appeal that has also seen it travel to more than 170 countries around the world. There have also been remakes in four countries, including Turkey, Italy and Korea.
BBC Studios will launch The Split: Barcelona to the international market at Mipcom next week, with Spanish streamer Filmin already pre-buying the show.
The two-parter promises to be “heartbreaking at times, but it is absolutely joyful,” Walker says. “I think we could all do with a bit of that at the moment in our lives.
“The issues the family go through are not light. But the way they are starting to adjust and respond to problems in their lives has moved on. They’re all a little bit older, a little bit wiser, a little bit more stoic and more drunk at times.”
“Weddings have a natural, dramatic three act structure: the before, the wedding and the after,” Morgan notes. “It’s beautiful and it’s got all these lovely tropes you can play with, from hen nights to the wedding breakfast to getting drunk on lots of sangria. It’s a really fun landscape to put those characters into it.”
But just as Walker would tell fans “never say never” about returning to The Split, Morgan now teases the same about potential future installments of the show. A spin-off, The Split Up, is also in the works for BBC One.
“The audience is always a barometer for me. I’d love to keep writing for the family in some way, but the central element of a family law firm is also a great vehicle and I can see it’s got lots of legs,” she says.
“These are classy actors; you’ve got to work hard to keep hold of them and it’s just lovely to get everyone back again. I just love working on the show. Another glass of wine, another kitchen table, who knows what can happen.”
tagged in: Abi Morgan, BBC Studios, Jane Featherstone, Last Tango in Halifax, Nicola Walker, River, Sister, Spooks, Stephen Mangan, The Split, The Split: Barcelona, Toby Stephens, Unforgotten